Thursday, May 26, 2016

I was just looking at the Comics Journal website, and stumbled upon a neat article about the comics "scene" as it pertains to Northampton, MA, home of Mirage Studios. It's a pretty good piece, but I noticed this error:"Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird moved here and started Mirage Studios shortly after Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #1 was released."While it is true that we moved to Northampton "shortly" after TMNT #1 was released (I guess two years could conceivably qualify as "shortly"), it is not true that we "started Mirage Studios" upon moving to Northampton (in the summer of 1986, by the way). Mirage Studios was actually started back in 1983, in Dover, NH, less than a year before we published TMNT #1 in May of 1984. Mirage then moved to Sharon, CT and stayed there for two years before ending up in Northampton. -- PLHere's the link to the article:http://www.tcj.com/northampton-ma-scene-report/

Monday, May 2, 2016

My daughter Emily reminded me today that I'd been quoted in a New York Times article about the Turtles being chosen as this year's "family ambassadors" for New York City. Here's the link she sent me to the story:

It's pretty cool that the TMNT are being employed in this fashion, I think. -- PL

P.S. There is a link in the fifth paragraph of the piece for "their origin story", which takes you to a page at http://mentalfloss.com/article/30862/complete-history-teenage-mutant-ninja-turtles, wherein one of the first things you read is "Struggling artists Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird were living in Northampton, Massachusetts, when they came up with the Turtles in November 1983." That's a pretty blatant error with which to begin an otherwise decent article -- as true TMNT fans know, while Kevin and I met and became friends in Northampton in 1981, it wasn't until two years later -- when we were living in the same house in Dover, New Hampshire -- that we created the TMNT. It's particularly distressing to me because the writer of the mentalfloss.com article states in the first paragraph that "To make sure I got the scoop on everyone’s favorite pizza-obsessed heroes in a half-shell, I went straight to the source—co-creator Peter Laird—who was kind enough to answer our burning questions about the franchise. " I can't really remember being interviewed for this article, and I can't find any email record of it, but I know for certain I would never have told anyone that the Turtles were created in Northampton. In fact, I have pointed out this same mistake a number of times when I have seen it online and in print. Other than that, as I mentioned, it's a decent article. It's a long way from the "Complete History of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles", but as the last line of its first paragraph states, it's "a pretty good place to start".